Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Whenever it happens; wherever it happens… it’s bad and it’s wrong
and it’s illegal. Everyone agrees that those who perpetrate it should be
punished to the full extent of the law.

As with all crimes, it’s better to prevent sexual abuse
before it happens. Normally, we do so by making sure that everyone knows the price
he will pay for doing it. Less normally, when we discover patterns of sexual
abuse or harassment within organizations we hold sensitivity training sessions
so that everyone will learn empathy. We believe, naively, that more empathy
will necessarily lead to less crime.

And then there’s what I will call the harm’s-way argument.
If a woman puts herself in harm’s way, and becomes the victim of a sexual
assault, the fact that she has been incautious does not in any way obviate the
fact that her abuser deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law.

But that should not mean that women should behave
incautiously. Why take unnecessary risks in order to make a point?

The criminal justice and society’s rules are ultimately about preventing crime. If your child has been murdered it is cold comfort to know
that the perpetrator will be sent to jail.

Prosecution of her attacker is not going to make the pain go
away. Thomas Sowell points out correctly that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound
of cure.

Unfortunately, it sounds trite. If it’s you or your child,
it isn’t.

Sowell made his remarks in the midst of an excellent column
on sexual assault in the military. In case you have not been paying attention,
the Senate Armed Services Committee has been holding hearings on the subject.

Watching women senators berate male military officers has stirred
the loins of the New York Times. Sowell has chosen to examine the issue more
judiciously.

The Times loves the picture of women on the Senate Committee
confronting military leaders. Sowell notes that it is political theatre,
tailored more to the ambitions of the participants than to the goal of reducing
sexual assault in the military.

Surely, the hearings are not about making our armed forces
better at doing their job.

After all, Sowell reminds us, it took a special kind of
genius to throw caution to the winds and to ignore human history in
order to make military organization conform to the ideological prejudices of
politicians.

Keep in mind, it was done in order to open job opportunities
for women. No one paid very much attention to whether co-edification would make the military stronger and more effective. When your military is vastly superior to everyone else's you think that you can get away with introducing inefficiencies.

The argument also said that if you allow discrimination on the basis
of gender in the military, you will eventually be allowing it everywhere.

The difference between civilian employment and military
service seems to have been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

In Sowell’s words:

For
thousands of years, people around the world had the common sense to realize
that putting young men and young women together in military operations was
asking for trouble, not only for these young people of both sexes, but for the
effectiveness of military forces entrusted with the fate of nations.

Yet, in
these politically correct times, civilian leaders, who increasingly have had no
experience whatever in the armed forces, are far more willing to try to
micro-manage the military than leaders were back in the days when most members
of Congress and most presidents had served in the military.

There
seems to be something liberating about ignorance and inexperience. You are free
to believe whatever you want to, unencumbered by hard facts, and, if you have
political power, to impose your headstrong ignorance on those with firsthand
knowledge.

If
sexual assaults in the military are taking place in our own country, far from
the scenes of battle, what do you suppose is going to happen when men and women
are in the same tents or trenches at night on battlefields thousands of miles
away? We don’t have to ask what will happen on warships at sea. The number
of Navy women who already get pregnant in such places tells us more plainly
than words.

If one asks what effect this rage to co-edify the military
is having on its ability to function, one comes away with more detriments than
benefits.

When human resources are diverted to solving the problems that
arise when teenage men and women bunk down together, Sowell points out that they
are being diverted from somewhere else:

How
much of this country’s military resources do you think should be diverted from
preparing for, and fighting, battles involving life and death to adjudicating
conflicting stories about who did what to whom, and whether it was consensual
or not?

We are, Sowell continues, asking all the wrong questions:

Too
much of the discussion of issues involving the role of women in the military is
based on questions about whether women can do the same tasks as men with equal
efficiency. The real question is whether either sex functions as well with the
other sex around. If you don’t think either sex finds the other sex
distracting, you are ignoring thousands of years of experience around the
world.

Nobody
needs to be distracted in life and death situations, where the difference
between victory and defeat can be “a near run thing,” as the Duke of Wellington
said after the battle of Waterloo, which settled the fate of Europe for
generations to come. Even consensual sex among members of the same
military unit opens a whole Pandora’s box of complications that can undermine
the morale of the unit as a whole — and morale can be the difference between
victory and defeat, between life and death.

Of course, when it comes to tasks involving physical
strength, women cannot do as well as men. If military women are not required to
conform to the same physical standards as military men, don’t you imagine that
that, in and of itself, represents a form of discrimination? Why are you
surprised to see that this discrimination provokes some ugly emotions?

Worse yet, Sowell notes, when Congressional leaders who have
never served in the military take it upon themselves to micro-manage personal problems, they will create a situation where military commanders will be chosen based on
their ability to deal with sexual abuse in the barracks, not on their ability
to win wars:

A more
insidious consequence of having ignorant civilians micro-managing the military
is that the caliber of a nation’s military leaders can be affected when
generals have to pass through filters of political correctness to reach the
top. That means losing people whose only abilities are in winning wars with
minimum casualties, or preventing wars by knowing the right deployment of the
right forces. Top military talent is no more common than any other kind of top
talent — and the stakes are too high to filter out that talent with
requirements that generals be able to pretend to do the impossible on sexual
issues.

5 comments:

"Whenever it happens; wherever it happens… it’s bad and it’s wrong and it’s illegal. Everyone agrees that those who perpetrate it should be punished to the full extent of the law."

Except at Amherst.http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2012/10/surviving-rape-at-amherst.html

What Sowell is describing in the behavior of our know-nothing "public servants" is something he eloquently pointed out to me years ago: self-congratulation as social policy. It has nothing to do with the facts, much less effectiveness. It's a product of their imagination... what they wish the world to be. And it's a safe hypothesis, given that they and their family members are unlikely to serve in the military. It's pure grandstanding and it's sick. Yet the Oprah audience will stand and applaud this kind of vacuous nonsense because its nothing more than a feel-good, let's-make-pretend abstraction in La-La Land.

Am empathetic military is a dead military. One of the reason so many men are getting killed is that the ROE are too empathic and generally pushed by people who have never faced combat and all that that entails.

Empathy has a positive expression and a negative expression. The positive side of empathy is compassion which motivates the desire to reduce suffering of self and others. The negative side of empathy is contempt for the vital needs of self and others. The dominant and trustworthy military or police force will have compassion which forms better character, teamwork, planning and execution.

"To Protect and Serve." This requires a compassionate person with prudence: the ability to govern activity by the use of reason. But reason must be guided by compassion to be just and honorable to protect and serve rather than intimidate and show contempt.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another whereas compassion is the sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.Compassion is a wonderful thing especially if it is tempered with logic and an idea of doing things that actually help. Making people slaves to the state is NOT compassionate.I suspect sharing the feeling of a jihadist, nazi, racist, homophobe, et al is really not going to turn out well for the recipient of those concepts. I am quite sure that they will love your empathy.In my dreams I want Anon 12:15 on the front lines singing "Kumbaya."